[Lingtyp] PhD position (Jena): Bimodal multilingual corpus linguistics (European languages)

[Volker Gast]

PhD position at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany): 
Bimodal multilingual corpus linguistics

The Department of English and American Studies at the Friedrich Schiller 
University Jena invites applications for a PhD position in the area of 
comparative corpus linguistics. The position will be situated in the 
project 'Bimodal corpus-based language comparison. A study of 
connectives of contingency in European languages', funded by the German 
Science Foundation. The successful candidate is expected to hold a 
degree in General or English linguistics or a related field (e.g. 
Romance or Slavic Studies, Computational linguistics). They should 
ideally have experience working with (multilingual) corpora and at least 
basic programming skills (R, Python). For more information, please see 
the project description below and do not hesitate to contact me at 
volker.gast at uni-jena.de for further information.

Deadline: 10 July, 2023
Start date: open until filled
Salary: according to the TV-L salary scale (65%), see for instance 
https://linktype.iaa.uni-jena.de/VG/GEW-Entgelttabelle-TVL.pdf
Time of employment: 36 months

Please send your application to volker.gast at uni-jena.de with CV and 
statement of research interests (letters of reference are optional); 
official address: Prof. Volker Gast, Department of Englisha and American 
Studies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Ernst-Abbe-Platz 8, 07743 
Jena, Germany
Reference number: 173/2023 (must be mentioned for administrative purposes)

Project description

The project deals with connectives expressing a conditional, causal or 
concessive relation, such as English `if, `because' and `although'. We 
use a bimodal translation corpus (EPTIC-J) to study the use and 
distribution of relevant connectives in twenty European national 
languages. The EPTIC-J corpus contains transcripts of speeches delivered 
in the European Parliament as well as their simultaneous interpretations 
and written translations into the other languages of the European Union. 
This corpus design allows us to examine connectives in terms of their 
distribution in the original language as well as cross-linguistic 
correspondences reflected in the (offline/written as well as 
simultaneous/spoken) translations. Contingency connectives are 
interpretatively complex, insofar as they have a truth-functional 
interpretation and at the same time trigger communicative effects at the 
level of discourse and argumentation. The main questions of the project 
are (i) how aspects of meaning at different levels of interpretation map 
onto aspects of linguistic form (distribution of subordinators and 
linear arrangement of sentences), and (ii) what degrees of cognitive 
load are associated with particular connectives and the relations they 
express. To answer question (i), we use only the written part of the 
corpus. For question (ii), we rely on the interpretation data, using the 
choice of a translation option and the `ear-voice-span' (EVS/décalage) 
as indicators of cognitive load. By applying a new methodology (bimodal 
comparative corpus analysis) to the study of a topic that has been 
treated from different perspectives (typology, sentence semantics, 
discourse/conversation and argumentation), in particular by integrating 
spoken data, we will look at generalizations made in previous work from 
a new perspective.